


Bookkeeping

by vanitashaze



Series: Bookkeeping [1]
Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Aromantic Character, Asexual Character, Battle of Five Armies Fix-It, Disabled Character, Dís Feels, F/M, Family Feels, Fíli Feels, Gen, Kíli Feels, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Thorin Feels, Thorin's A+ Parenting, Trans Male Character, Underworld
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-25
Updated: 2016-07-12
Packaged: 2018-04-01 03:08:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4003537
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vanitashaze/pseuds/vanitashaze
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It would be so easy, Fíli thinks. To gather up all his fear for Kíli and the Company, the shame of his ignoble death, the aches and pains and little disappointments of living, and let them all fall from his hands. To see his father again, now only a bright-haired laughing blur in his memory. Fíli is dead, and his family will cut their beards and ashen their brows, but Kíli will have run and Thorin will have fought and they will live on. Fíli is dead and this is where he belongs.</p><p>"And the other option?" he asks, softly.</p><p>i.e., Fíli brings his family home from the Underworld.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The Fall

If he were a proper mythic hero, Fíli would have gone out in a blaze of glory. He would have never allowed himself to be captured. He would have fought to his last living breath and took dozens of Azog's forces with him into death.  
  
As it is, he only fights his captors long enough to realize that if he dies in a scuffle in this labyrinth, no one but Azog's forces will know, and his kin will unwittingly follow him right into an ambush. After that, he drops his arms, allows himself to be captured and pushed forward down the passageway - betting that Azog intends to show off his prize before he kills him. What use is wiping out the line of Durin if you can't do it loudly and publicly?  
  
If Fíli must sell his life, he will not do so for his own glory, but for the lives of his family. For his baby brother, who even now creeps through the tunnels beneath him. If his death can buy them a warning of what waits for them here on Ravenshill -  
  
So be it, he thinks to himself, and the words echo through his mind like the slamming of a great door, a surety that settles within him even as he can barely manage to stomp down the gibbering, shaking terror that also rises up within him.  
  
Of course, he adds to himself, wryly, if he were a proper mythic hero, he wouldn't have been captured in the first place. He wouldn't be willingly marching to his death surrounded by his enemy, for it is a cowardly and undwarvish thing, to bare your throat to the knife when you still have the teeth to lunge for theirs, and his people do not sing eddas about cowards.  
  
It matters not what they will sing of him in his funeral dirge, he tells himself; nor what they tell his kin afterwards. Not anymore. It matters only that there are some left to sing. Only that he has kin left to listen.  
  
He is surprised to find that his teeth are chattering. He clenches his jaw shut, so that his captors do not have the satisfaction of hearing him chitter like a mindless squirrel - though any orc could smell the adrenaline and stifled panic rolling off of him - as he fights against his instinct to fight, to run, to do anything but meekly shuffle forward.  
  
Fíli has faced down death before. He has killed for food and survival and war. He has hacked through the bodies of living orcs and brought their intestines to spill out on the ground, and split the skull of an attacking bandit with a throwing axe. He has watched his brother nearly die on some strange man's kitchen table. Throughout this entire journey, he's known that the possibility of dying lurked around every turn in the road, but the idea of his death has never seemed so stomach-twistingly real as it does now, perhaps because it has never been so sure a possibility. He will die. He will die soon. He will die soon, here. He will die soon, here, by the hand of the creature that gestures for him to be pushed forward -  
  
He is forced to the front of the cluster of orcs, who jeer and prod him as he passes. He is finally shoved into Azog's hands, and Fíli meets his eyes defiantly, staring down his death - the only defiance he will allow himself - but Azog only grins. His teeth gleam dully, a mouthful of knives.  
  
Azog is talking. Fíli does not hear him. They are standing at the edge of the tunnel, where stone meets the open air, and the wind rushes up to him, filling his lungs with the sweetness of new snow. Across the distance, he can see Uncle Thorin and cousin Dwalin, and a smaller figure that might be Bilbo.  
  
They have seen him. Good. They know, now, what lurks in Ravenshill. They will not be butchered alone and unsuspecting in the dark.  
  
In the tunnels, the smell of blood and shit and unwashed orc was so strong he could barely breathe, but out here, the air is clear and sharp. It's colder here than it is in the Blue Mountains, and back home the first traces of winter will only just be beginning, a chill creeping through the night to settle over the mornings, soft and dangerous as a kiss with the promise of more to come.  
  
In Ered Luin, it's the season for chopping wood and hoarding potatoes, for Amad to come tramping home with a still-warm dead deer slung over her shoulders, droplets of the deer's blood trailing behind her like rubies on the frost. She and Uncle will butcher it in the yard behind the house, Dwalin lazing about calling out advice until she throws a handful of entrails at him and he comes down to actually help, and Uncle will laugh at them and smile, one of the rare ones that crinkles up the corners of his eyes.  
  
This is Fíli's family: kings and princen kneeling in the dirt behind their tiny house with blood up to their elbows, walking wounded but still able to laugh, still alive.  
  
Uncle and Dwalin would have helped her with the butchering, but they're not there, and the house they all share is dark and shuttered, not safe for Amad to live there alone, and too big and empty to heat anyways. She'll bring it down to Gimli's mother Mizim instead, the closest kin she has left in Ered Luin, and they'll wait out the winter together. Ered Luin expected no news until the spring, Fíli remembers, for no one knew if the ravens yet lived, and the northern snows were too treacherous for travelers. She'll spend months waiting for her family to come home to her, not knowing that he is already dead and rotting in the stone.  
  
With the excellent timing typical of his family, it is in this moment that Fíli realizes that he doesn't really want this. He doesn't want to be brave or glorious, he doesn't want songs, he just wants to go back home. He just wants to _live_. And now it is too late, because Azog is speaking and then the sword is being rammed through his chest, and as Fíli's bowels turn to water and his left lung gapes open like a gutted fish and pain roars in his chest, all he can think of is that fucking deer and its dumb, glassy stare -  
  
and he wants to cry out, but he cannot speak - no air, no blood, no _life_ left -  
  
Thorin watching as Azog now throws him from the cliff -  
  
and Fíli did not want this, he did not believe it could happen, he does not want to die -  
  
please, Kíli, run, run back to Ered Luin, at least let my brother live, Thorin Kíli Ama' Ama' Mahal _Ama_ ',  
  
and then there is only darkness and fathomless height, falling down and down and down and -

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Gimli's mother's name shamelessly borrowed from Sansûkh, which everyone ever should read. Seriously, go now.


	2. Awakenings

Fíli wakes up cold, every piece of exposed skin needle-pricked and raw. He's lying on his back on what feels like stone, its chill seeping into his body even through the layers of chain-mail and leather and wool, and when he opens his eyes, he has to squint against the sudden brightness of the endless white sky above him.   
  
Snow, he realizes, as he pushes himself up off the stone floor - a huge snow-field stretching out from every side of his rock, dissolving into thick grasping mist at the horizon. He doesn't recognize this place. The landscape looks familiar, but not familiar enough. There's a fine layer of snow across his body that must have covered him while he slept, so he must have been laying here a while; it isn't snowing now. His body is stiff with cold as he slowly leverages himself up to sitting, then standing, and he clenches and unclenches his fingers, willing the blood back into them as his cold-sluggish mind struggles to make sense of any of this.   
  
He must have fallen at some point in the battle, been knocked unconscious. He gingerly touches the back of his head, feeling for any wounds, and for a moment, he swears that he feels blood and bone shards mixed in with his hair, a pulpy texture that could only be his own brains - but when he pulls his hand away, nauseated, his fingers come back clean.   
  
Maybe it was a light hit, an accident rather than a would-be killing blow. He at least hopes he didn't trip over his own feet again and knock himself out, like he had that time last winter. Kíli would never let him live it down.   
  
Kíli. Where was Kíli?  
  
…For that matter, where was Fíli? And how long has he lain here? Why hasn't anyone come looking for him?   
  
A terrible fear grips him as he realizes that there might be no one left to look. Azog's hordes might have triumphed - even now, Erebor might be overrun with orcs, Dale burning, dwarves and elves and men all slain. He wheels around, looking desperately for a glimpse of anyone else, friend or enemy, but he is alone. There is no movement except the white clouds of his own breath, drifting away on the wind; no sound but the faint whistling of the wind as it blows over the empty plain. He looks closer, shielding his eyes from the white-out glare, and realizes there are no bodies, either, not even bloodstains, or fallen weapons, or disturbed snow where they might have been moved.  
  
"Hello?" he calls out, as loud as he dares. "Is there anyone… here?"  
  
Nothing responds, and the empty plain swallows his words. He breathes deeply in, and the cold, clean smell of new snow rushes to his head, chasing out the last cobwebs of sleep, and he remembers.  
  
 _Thorin Kíli Ama' Ama' Mahal Ama' -!_  
  
The memory of his death washes over him like a boiling wave. His mouth is full with the memory of his own blood and he's barely aware of falling to his knees before he begins to retch, stomach heaving as his body remembers what it felt like to be there in Azog's grasp, knowing that he was going to die and shaking with useless rage and terror because there was nowhere to go, nowhere to run to and no way to fight, the sword burst through his back to his chest and his lungs seizing as he started to drown in his own blood -  
  
He cannot stop shaking. His teeth are chattering and waves of hot and cold crash over his skin and he cannot stop shaking.  
  
Mahal, he had been so scared.  
  
His legs probably would not hold him now, so he manages to push himself away from the splatter of vomit, and hunches into himself on the ground, arms wrapped around his own shoulders, until the worst of the shakes pass. Eventually he rises up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.  
  
"So, I'm… dead," he says, testing out the words. It doesn't feel real, even with the ghost of his death still burning like hot wire in his veins. "I'm dead. I'm dead."  
  
He laughs at the sheer ridiculousness of it, but sobers quickly. If this is the Halls of Waiting, it is certainly not what he expected. Other dwarves fell in the battle, many dwarves, Fíli did not pass into death alone; where are his dead brethren? Where are his ancestors, welcoming him into their company to await the remaking of the world? Where are the great marvels of stone to outshine Khazad-Dûm, the warmth of a thousand thousand forge fires, the song and craft and fellowship that were the birthright of every dwarf once they passed from this world?  
  
Were these not the Halls? Has he done something wrong, to not be brought there like he should be?  
  
"Hello?" he calls, louder now that he knows he is in no danger. "Hello? Where am I?"  
  
There is no answer save the blowing wind.  
  
"Is anyone here?" he shouts, louder still. "Hello? Please, where am I? Is this… Are these the Halls?"  
  
The wind picks up, rustling his heavy battle-braids and whistling in his ear, as if to mock his unanswered questions.   
  
"If I am dead, let me be dead," he begs the empty air. "Don't keep me waiting here. Or if I have to wait, at least let me see what's happened to my kin? What's happened since I died? Is Thorin alright? Is Kíli alright?"  
  
Fíli is not his uncle - or for that matter, his mother - with their notorious forest-fire tempers, constantly smoldering, ready to burst forth in an instant. He usually keeps a cool head, but in the span of the last few days alone, he has watched his uncle go mad, watched him nearly throw Bilbo of all people off a wall to his death; saw his kin fight and die; fought in his first real battle, bloody and horrible and nothing like the stories; died himself; and woken up alone in this strange, confounding place, so he thinks that when he receives no answer, yet again, he can be forgiven for picking stones off the ground and hurling them at the snowfield, yelling a few choice epithets before his cries devolve into wordless frustration and he is left with empty hands.  
  
If he must stay here, he might as well get off this stupid lump of rock. The distance to the ground doesn't look too far to jump, especially for his stone-sturdy dwarven bones, but he would rather not slip on ice and brain himself again, if such a thing is possible in this place, so he plots his way down from his barren perch, one steep ledge from the next. As he inches down, bracing himself against the rock, Fíli is reminded of the Company's careful journey down the Carrock, and he stifles the unexpected wave of sadness that rises up in him at the memory - of his uncle, alight and alive, smiling at their Burglar more joyfully than Fíli had seen in years, and the Company's collective hush as they saw Erebor, some for the first time, and others with tears rolling down their cheeks.   
  
The Lonely Mountain may have been a possessive ghost to those who had lived their lives in her, and a dark, hungry curse for those unlucky dwarrows who came of age on the road, but to Fíli and Kíli and Ori and Gimli - to all the dwarves raised up in Ered Luin - Erebor was a tale for dwarflings, a magical place where the streets were paved with diamonds and there was always fresh bread on the table and new clothes every month. No matter how bad things got in Ered Luin, things would always be better in Erebor, and some day, they would return there. Ori's mum said that every dwarf lived as kings in Erebor, but as a dwarfing, Fíli was not much impressed, having seen how kings lived: Thorin ate and dressed and worked much as any Ereborean exile, and being king only seemed to mean extra work when others would be gaming, or drinking, or resting after too much work for too little coin.   
  
Fíli much preferred the version Thorin sang of on those rare nights when his family was all under one roof, his uncle's voice low and sad as cousin Dwalin and Amad hummed harmony, her big tattooed hands stroking through Fíli's hair and little Kíli nestled into cousin Balin's beard. Ghosts lived in Thorin's song - ghosts live in all the songs that exiles sing - and Fíli used to see them in the flames of their little hearth-fire, long-dead faces swaying and flickering in the dark.  
  
He's made it down to the second ledge when his boot catches on the edge of something and sends him stumbling, almost skidding off the edge. Scowling, he wheels around to find what he tripped over, and stops. In his flailing, his boots had disturbed the snow crusted on the rock, and there's something about the pattern of the exposed stone, lines that look too purposeful to be natural. Some sort of old carvings, maybe? There's nothing else in this place to give him any clue where he is, so Fíli drops down to one knee to inspect them.  
  
Not just carvings, but Khuzdul, Cirth, older than any he has seen - weathered and faded by water and wind and the passing of seasons, but still mostly legible. _ome, lit_ , he reads. Curious, he scrapes away some more of the snow.  
  
 _Welcome, little prince._  
  
His heart gives an unpleasant jolt, and he is suddenly aware of the huge emptiness around him, the silence of this place that is too total to be natural.  
  
"Who am I speaking with?" he asks, and when he hears no answer, he thinks for a moment, then goes to scrape more of the snow away from the stone floor.  
  
 _The dog that guards the door._  
 _The boat that crosses the river._  
 _The hands that hold you in the dark._  
  
Not at all worrying, he thinks to himself.  
  
 _You might think so, yes._  
  
"This isn't the Halls," he tries, repressing a shudder.  
  
 _No._  
  
"Then where am I? Why am I not there?"  
  
 _We heard you as you fell._  
 _You were lucky, little prince._  
 _We don't always listen._  
  
"I don't understand," Fíli says.  
  
 _You wished to live._  
 _We heard your wish._  
 _Only the dead go to Mandos' Halls._  
  
"So, I'm not dead?" Fíli asks.  
  
 _You are dead._  
 _But not everything dead stays that way._  
  
"I won't come back as a wight," Fíli says, quickly. "Or a bone-stealer. I'd rather stay dead, properly dead."  
  
 _There are other options._  
 _We can open the door to the Halls._  
 _All are welcome there._  
 _Mothers and murderers._  
 _Thieves and kings._  
 _It's behind you._  
  
He turns, standing. There is a rough door in the rock-face where there was none before. It is closed, but Fíli can see where it would open, and he fancies that he can hear distant music and voices through it, and ever so faintly, the clang of hammers. The door is warm when he cautiously touches it. It would be so easy, he thinks. To gather up all his fear for Kíli and the Company, the shame of his ignoble death, the aches and pains and little disappointments of living, and let them all fall from his hands. To see his father again, now only a bright-haired laughing blur in his memory. Fíli is dead, and his family will cut their beards and ashen their brows, but Kíli will have run and Thorin will have fought and they will live on. Fíli is dead and this is where he belongs.  
  
"And the other option?" he asks, softly, and kneels to reveal it.  
  
 _You will be judged and measured._  
 _You will pay the cost of what you want._  
 _If you can afford to pay._  
  
He rises and reaches for the door, fully intending to pull it open, but instead he just… stays there, palm pressed against the handle.   
  
He is dead. This is where he belongs. His ancestors are waiting for him, and he can wait until the remaking of the world in music and food and work. Every outrageous tale the old dwarrows told about Erebor - endless feasts, diamond streets, no one hungry or sick or tired - they would hold true in these Halls. And there is a stronger voice in his head, whispering that the dead should stay dead, that nothing good will come of any other paths he might choose to walk down. Hasn't he had enough of uncertain futures and reckless decisions?  
  
The door is warm under his fingers. His hand starts to move - whether tightening on the handle or drawing back, he does not know, he probably never will know, because it is in that moment that Kíli's death rings out in his head like a bell, and Fíli falls to knees, the door forgotten and all his doubts along with it.  
  
"He's dead," Fíli says, through numb lips. "No, he's - please, tell me I'm wrong, please," frantically scrambling across revealed stone, looking for a snow-covered patch to divine his answer from.  
  
 _You are not wrong._  
  
Kíli was not supposed to die. Fíli has guessed by now that his uncle never expected to survive the quest, that he brought along his heirs so that they could claim the mountain when he fell gaining it, but neither of them were supposed to die, especially not Kíli. Not his baby brother. Kíli was going to hold together their mum while Dís held together the kingdom, he was going to grow a proper beard and finally land that trick-shot and scandalize all the grey-beards with that elf captain of his, he was going to be cracking jokes and pulling stupid pranks when he was two hundred and ninety-three. Fíli died so his brother might live and now it doesn't matter, because that fool managed to get himself killed anyways.  
  
"Where is he? Where's my brother?"  
  
 _Your brother is a rude houseguest._  
 _He should have been here earlier but he's late, late._  
 _The arrow brought him but the starlight took him back._  
  
"Then where did he go?" Fíli demands. "Is he in the Halls?"  
  
 _Once he walked the starlight road and now he tries again._  
 _The starlight road was not made for Aüle's children._  
 _The starlight road will not carry him._  
 _He fights the road and the road fights back._  
  
"Then I will find him," Fíli promises the stone. "I will find him, and we'll find the way out, and we'll leave together."  
  
The door is gone. The next patch of rock he scrapes clean is bare. He is alone on a rock in the middle of a featureless snowfield in death with no idea where to go except 'not here', but instead of giving the rock a good hard kick, Fíli squares his shoulders and climbs down to the next ledge, and the next, until he takes his first tentative step into the snow. He sinks up to his calves, but the ground underneath is firm and holds his weight, and he hears no cracks from hidden ice.  
  
There are no signposts here, nor paths that he can see, and the snow and fog beyond are the same at all sides. Fíli breathes in the stinging air and thinks of his brother walking starlight paths alone, of the love that stretches out like a rope between them. There, his heart-strings tell him, that way. The same older-brother-sense that would tell him when Kíli was about to fall off a ladder or shoot at something he wasn't allowed to. Fíli fixes his eyes on the misty horizon and lets his heart pull him forward, boots crunching in the clean white snow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you are enjoying it so far (or have any questions), leave a comment!


	3. Fog

At first glance, this place does not seem so different from the living world. The air is crisp and stinging, the ice-crust breaks underfoot, and when he brings it to his mouth, curious, the snow melts sweet on his tongue.   
  
But still, there is still something unnatural about it. The ground is completely even, none of the small hillocks and holes and bumps of a true landscape, and though it snows continually, a light dusting that powders his hair and clothes, the level of the snow on the ground never rises, as if the new-fallen snow simply melts back into the earth only to instantly fall again from the sky. The ground remains solidly under his feet, but oddly, it reminds Fíli of their escape from Mirkwood - the terrible whirling confusion of river and sky as their barrels spun and tumbled down the river, dizziness and nausea made even more potent by his racing battle-blood. In the white of the sky and white of the land, the distant specter of fog the only marker of divide between the two, he feel as though if he is not careful with his step, he could fall right into the sky, drifting away to trudge, oblivious, through the clouds. At some point, he swears the snow is falling upside down, rising up from the ground to disappear far above his head.  
  
He does not know how long he walks for. The sun hides its face behind snow-clouds - if the sun even exists here at all, he thinks - but the light shows no signs of dimming, nor does his shadow creep across the ground. At one point, he tries to measure his travels by counting his footsteps, but he quickly loses track, the number sliding from his mind like oil on water. Maybe this is not a place for such things, he thinks. Certainly, the more he tries to concentrate on the details of the landscape, the more his thoughts speed away from him, leaving him blinking like a drunkard at the dazzle of white on white. It takes him too long to realize that the line of his bootprints stretches not twenty paces behind him, the ones behind disappearing, and his feet no longer make any sound as he trudges through the snow.  
  
Never overly talkative, Fíli is used to being quiet, and the gentle percussion of his own breathing is usually as pleasant a music to him as laughing conversation. After a while, though, the silence starts to grate on him.   
  
Fíli grew up first in muddy tent-and-wagon cities, with only a layer of mildewing canvas to muffle the outside world, no time to settle into anything more permanent before the ill-will of nearby Men drove them on. They were terrifyingly vulnerable and gratingly overcrowded, spreading sickness and bad tempers alike, and universally hated by the dwarves who had little choice but to live in them.  
  
But perhaps his people had also grown accustomed to them, Fíli thinks, for the ghost of the tent cities lingered in the narrow streets of Ered Luin, where the houses huddled together like frightened children and you were barely able to set a foot outside your own door without stepping on someone else's. Even in the quietest times, on the days of prayer or in the still, blue hours of the early morning, there was always someone doing something noisy with someone else three houses down and one floor up.   
  
For all the times he'd stuffed his head under his pillow and groaned over Dwalin's drunken laughter in the kitchen or the newlyweds next door who desperately needed to move their bed away from the wall, Fíli finds himself wishing for even a sliver of that noise here, something to break up the awful silence that buzzes in his ears louder than the sounds of home ever had. He finds himself wondering if this is what it's like for Oin - this endless drowning absence.   
  
...But no, that's not right, is it? Oin still has some of his hearing left - and besides, even when he does go completely deaf, it will be no great loss in the strange way it seems to be for men, for dwarves talk and sing and laugh with their hands just as often as their mouths. A silent kind of noise, but noise the same, and Fíli misses it no less fiercely. At home his family signed as often as they spoke, for noise was an agony to Amad when she got one of her headaches, more and more frequent as the years go by. It's been strange to hear Thorin and Kíli's voices so much on the quest, to always have to listen as well as watch.  
  
Fíli can't talk to himself here. He never picked up the habit, and this feels like the worst possible place to try. He signs a bit of the song that Bifur was hand-singing over and over again as they were trudging up the mountain, but he quickly stops, feeling oddly exposed, oddly… watched.  
  
He's being ridiculous, he tells himself. There are no other living things here. As soon as the thought crosses his mind, he snorts - after all, he thinks, allowing himself a small smirk at his own joke, he doesn't count as a living thing, either. He automatically turns to share his quip with Kíli, already planning his rejoinder -   
  
And there is no one there, and something in his chest twists painfully at the sight of the unbroken snow beside him where there should be another set of footprints, where there should be his _brother_.  
  
Fíli was supposed to protect him. Shepherd him. Take care of him, as he has done from the very moment he was big enough for Amad to settle Kíli into his arms and pick up her tools and the bracelet with the missing clasp that would help buy their bread for the next night. Barely a child himself, Fíli had looked down at the sticky-handed, burbling thing happily smearing handfuls of spit all over Fíli's favorite tunic, and thought, I will never love anything as much as you, even my own life.  
  
"Your uncle will not be careful," Amad had whispered, the night before the Company left. "Neither will your brother. Please, my love, take care of them for me. Bring my family back to me. If you must -" and here her voice broke " - Fíli, bring me back my sons."  
  
He still remembers the desperate gentleness of her embrace, with her forehead pressed against Fíli's and her hand cupping the back of his neck. He wonders if his mother was remembering all the dwarves she had sent off to war like that - her parents and grandfather and brothers and husband - and how few of them had returned.   
  
Had he and Kíli not existed, Fíli knows, she would have marched out to Azanulbizar with them, young as she was, succession be damned. His mother has a keen head for politics, but she has ever been ruled by the fierce, hungry love that seems to run in their line as surely as madness, or perhaps itself simply another kind of madness. Thousands of years their line has held, stretching back to Durin the Deathless himself, and he's sure that Dís would have thrown it all away for the chance to fall defending her family, instead of being left behind miles and miles away - and now they have left her behind again.  
  
Perhaps it's a good thing that he searches for a way back to life, he thinks, if only to spare himself and Kíli the shouting and more creative swearing that would have happened when their mum eventually joined them in the Halls. In one of her lighter moments, she had already informed them that should they pass on before her, she would not forgive them for several lifetimes at least, and as he trudges on, Fíli cheers himself by imagining the scolding that she will give her older brother once her sons are safe back in her arms.  
  
(He carefully does not think about relations between them should he fail - how they would sink into their separate darknesses, his mother's fury and his uncle's shame like a line of pikes between them. He does not.)  
  
Lost in his imaginings, it takes Fíli a while to realize that the fog is moving. No longer does it envelop every distant horizon, fixed and immobile, like the lines of a drawing give way to empty space on the paper. Now the fog-bank in front of him is moving, drawing closer with every footstep - or perhaps he is drawing closer to it. He cannot say, but it is the first sign of distance covered he has seen in what feels like days, or months, or hours, and it cheers and unsettles him by turns.   
  
His people have no stories of this place like they do of the Halls and so Fíli does not know for sure that anything ill awaits him.   
  
But if death were so easy to cheat, everyone would do so.  
  
The wall of white fog looms over him as he approaches it. At first, it is as high as the walls outside Ered Luin, and then it grows until it is as high as Dale, then the Lonely Mountain itself. It is moving, Fíli is sure of it now - rushing towards him too fast to match the speed of his approach, a terrible white wave, towering higher and higher over his head. He stops in his tracks, unsure, but the wave keeps coming, and in seconds, it will boil over him and he will be enveloped - but at the last moment, it stops, so quickly he staggers back, and the wave becomes a wall in front of him, its face smooth and immobile, like an enormous pane of clouded glass.   
  
It doesn't feel like glass, though. It doesn't feel like something that wants to keep anything out. Instead, as he approaches, it feels… oddly eager. Fíli is reminded of the trained dogs he's seen in the villages of men, their whole bodies quivering in a joyfully agonized restraint as they wait to be released by their master's command. It waits for him to approach it.  
  
He hesitates, wondering if he's meant to find another path, but his heart-sense of his brother cries out somewhere beyond the wall, calling him forwards, and so he steps forward, the tip of his left boot breaching the wall. The glass melts into smoke at his touch, and the first tendrils of fog curl around his boot like curious hands - tapping the metal toe-cap, ruffling through the fur-flap belted around his calf. He takes in as deep a breath as his lungs will allow, holds it, and steps fully into the fog.  
  
Every sense ceases. He cannot feel anything, not the movement of the breeze nor the sting of the cold. He cannot hear anything - not even the sound of his own breath or the rustling of his own clothing. The snow-field seems cacophonous by comparison. He cannot see anything but white, cannot even see himself when he looks down. He's not even certain he has a body anymore. He has a spine and he tells it to twist around, he has two eyes and he tells them to look for where he came from, any sign of a way in or a way out, but he has no way of knowing if they do those things, or even exist to try, for his body can tell him nothing.   
  
All is white. All is void. There is no in or out, no here or there, no mine or theirs.  
  
He drifts. He drifts. It is peaceful. He's not sure if he's moving or staying still, or what the difference would be. There was something he was here for, wasn't there? Wherever here is; whoever he is. Whatever he is. He's not entirely certain anymore. His mind stubbornly clings to a memory of bone and blood and meat, and for a while, he remembers existing in something like that, but it eventually bleeds away into the white, until only a strange pulsing core of himself is left. It is something bright and dense, like the heart of a star, and he thinks that this burning thing couldn't have been a part of him, anyways, because it is too bright, too hot, and he would have felt it, wouldn't he? Like a coal under his tongue.  
  
He tries to make it go away - to let it melt away as everything else has done - but it refuses, clinging to him, a stubborn bright lump of something separate and distinct. A pimple on the face of nirvana.   
  
It is so _irritating_ , and in desperation, he tries to smother it, wrapping around it and straining it through all the infinite points of him, like water through cloth, but it tangles him up instead. It melts him into alloy, and then it draws itself into hot wire that twists into approximations of feet that walked, and he remembers that he came here, and it twists into hands that reached, and he remembers that he wanted to leave.   
  
It pulls him forward, and he finds his hot wire hands clenched around a rope, and he remembers that there is a rope that has been anchored in him since the day his brother was born and on the other end of that rope is his brother.  
  
One hand over the other, grasp and let go, repeat, repeat. Like this he pulls himself forward through the void. At first it is achingly slow, and it takes all of his willpower to hold together what fragments of himself he can around this crude wire frame, barely the idea of a person at all, but the going gets easier as pieces of him slowly struggle back together. Memories weave themselves into bones around the wire, and then muscles around the bone, and all the while, he focuses on the solid realness of this love that pulls him out of nothingness and makes him exist, makes him _alive_.  
  
 _Kíli_ , he chants to himself, _Kíli Kíli Kíli_ , until the sound of his brother's name blurs together into a steady percussion that shudders through his ribs. Somewhere along the line, his mother's name joins his mantra, and his uncle's, and his cousins' and friends' and all of the Company's, and then the shopkeepers in Ered Luin who smile at him when he picks up a bit of pipeweed or a tin of salve, and the babes who toddle after Dwalin begging for a good toss up in the air, and yes, uncle, he thinks giddily, even Kíli's elf and your funny little hobbit, and his song of names wraps around him and pushes away the fog as he stumbles forwards through blankness and abruptly bursts out of the fog.  
  
The world explodes back into his senses. There is snow under his boots again and wind pricking his cheeks, and the land stretches out before him, this time rippled with hillocks and drifts, sloping gently downwards before dropping sharply down. When he turns, the wall of fog still hovers menacingly at his back, but it makes no move towards him, and there is no more on the horizon that he can see.  
  
"Mahal's hairy _arse_ ," Fíli says, with feeling, and frantically pats himself all over to check that he still has the right number of parts in the right places.  
  
Once he's assured himself that he hasn't ended up with his nose upside-down or his ears on his arse, he gives himself a few moments to just breathe before he sets out down the hill.   
  
He hasn't gone far when the faint smell of cooking meat teases his nose, and he's surprised to find his stomach gurgling, hunger gently uncurling in his belly. Perhaps even the dead have to eat, he thinks, and it does smell delicious - sizzling meat falling right off the bone. For a moment, he wonders if it's some sort of trap, meant to tempt him away from his course, but his heart-sense runs strong and true down the hill towards the edge of the slope, where the smell seems to be coming from.  
  
Maybe it's another traveler, he thinks (though who knows what animal they would be cooking over their campfire, for he's seen neither beast nor being here so far). Or perhaps a reward - a gift? - from whatever he spoke to on the rock? You got through our terrifying fog, here's some mutton. His heart feels a bit lighter at this thought, and Fíli picks up his step, marching down towards what he hopes will be good company, or at least, good food.


	4. The Forest

It is not food.

He is almost to the lip of the valley when he catches the sound of distant screams, mingled with the stronger and stronger smell of cooking meat. His belly knots in terrible suspicion, and he rushes forward to the edge of the slope, nearly tumbling off the edge before he catches himself and simply stares in abject horror.

An enormous wintertime forest sprawls out beneath him, and the entire forest is on fire. The trees are dry and defenseless, bare branches reaching towards the sky like pleading, blackened hands as flames jump from tree to tree, and walls of fire consume everything below. The roar of the devouring flames combines with the crackle of wood, like the cracking of breaking bones, and when a fresh gust of wind hits him in the face with the cooking meat smell, he almost gags, because he knows that smell, why did he not realize before, oh Mahal, he thought it was _food_. He is frozen, staring into the flame, shuddering in the grip of memory.

Everything is burning, burning falling down around him. Wailing parents throw their burning children into the lake while buildings turn to ash in a single gout of flame, and he cannot even spare a thought for whether his kin have survived up on the Mountain because he cannot think of anything beyond _run, escape, we must get out, we must get out_ , nor spare a thought for the Lakemen burning alive around him.

He does not realize he has fallen to his knees until his bare palms hit the snow. He cannot think, but he can feel, and the shock of cold nags insistently at him, like the desperate pealing of a distant bell. He is not on a boat. He is on solid ground. And despite the greedy claws of fear, he finds himself scrabbling forward, and then skidding down the hillside, running towards the burning forest to help whomever he can.

The shrieks grow louder as he grows closer, and he can start to see dark figures moving among the flames, but there is something wrong about the scene before him. At first, he cannot place it, his mind fuzzy from adrenaline and terror. He is at the foot of the hill now, racing across the flat expanse of ground between himself and the forest. Angrily, he tells that tiny wailing part of himself that is still trapped in the burning city on the lake to shove it, ruthlessly quashing it beneath the thump of his boots and the rhythm of his breath until he can _think_.

He can breathe without coughing, he realizes. There is no smoke on the wind, nor ash or spark. The forest-fire roars and leaps with the fury of Smaug himself, and amidst it all, he finally shakes the ghost of Laketown and sees what is truly before him.

The forest is on fire, but the forest does not burn. The skeletal trees stand silent and whole, untouched by the flames that rage around them. It brings little comfort to the dark figures Fíli glimpses between the trees, for they writhe and scream, their contortions silhouetted against the flames that so clearly devour them.

"This way!" Fíli shouts, "Come out of the forest, you'll be safe! Here! This is the way out!"

He waves his arms and jumps, hoping someone will see him, hear him, but no one comes stumbling out of the treeline.

In order to guide anyone out, it seems, he will have to plunge into the fire himself.

I am dead, Fíli angrily reminds himself. I am dead and nothing can kill me. I will not fear pain. I will not fear my own fear. I will not stand idly by while people suffer, nor hide my face when they need my help. Not again.

He spies a gap between two widely-spaced trees, big enough to walk through. He wraps his loose clothing as tightly around him as he can, pulling his hair and braids into a quick knot at the nape of his neck, and plunges forward.

The forest swallows him without hesitation. Fire climbs the trees beside him and ripples over his head in a great roiling curtain, close enough that Fíli fears his tightly-bound hair will still be caught alight. After the chill of the snowfields, the heat is a slap, hard and stinging, and he immediately begins to sweat under his clothes. He moves as fast as he dares through the trees, looking for the people that scream for help even still.

"Is anyone here?" he calls. "Where are you? I'm here to help! Please, come this way! Come to my voice!"

The cries are everywhere and nowhere. He can see little but fire, every direction he turns, and against the fierce light of the flames, what dim figures he does spy are merely dark silhouettes, crashing through the underbrush around him.

"Where are you?!" he shouts, again. "I know the way out! This way! This w -"

The toe of his boot catches on a hidden root. He stumbles and careens forward, two quick steps as he desperately tries to catch himself, but it is not enough to save him from crashing straight into one of the flaming trees. No time for anything, except to brace for the pain that will surely follow as he falls into the fire.

His hands meet the smooth, papery bark of the tree. He watches, fascinated, as flames lick at his elbows, forearms sunk fully into the fire. It does not hurt him. Only slightly hotter than the surrounding air; the temperature of tea right as it's ready to drink. Even amidst the screams and stench, he stands transfixed by its beauty, as it burnishes his skin and clothing a deep bloody gold.

There is a loud wail somewhere close by, and he looks up in time to see one of the dark figures come barreling across his path. It is a dwarf, he sees, tearing blindly at her burning tunic even as it catches her beard alight, flames racing up the dark, oiled braids as if they were candlewicks. Yet as she runs, it seems to Fíli that her tunic is blue, then red, then brown, and her limbs long and then short, while the lines and planes of her face ripple and change like a reflection in moving water - but the wild panic in her eyes is sharp and clear as she stumbles towards Fíli, still wailing in pain and terror.

He rushes towards her, already wresting off his heavy coat, thinking to smother the flames before they reach her face, but it is too late, her beard turning her hair into a terrible hungry halo. Barely an arms-length away from each other now, Fíli readies himself to throw the coat over her and roll her to the ground, and reaches for her outstretched hand.

His fingers reach right through her, her hand no more substantial than smoke. Fíli immediately cries out, his hand erupting into searing pain as if he's trying to pull a glowing iron out of a forge-fire, and he jerks backwards from her on instinct, curling in on himself. As she passes he has enough time to see the betrayal that passes over her face, her eyes hot and hard with anger, before she gives one last howl of anguish and then vanishes, her body drifting apart like ash on the wind.

He stumbles onwards, holding his burned hand to his chest. The pain dulls from searing to throbbing, and now he sees them properly, the shades, for that is what they must be - burning dwarves and men and elves, features warping like hot running wax, so that one moment it is an elf burned bloody crawling towards him, then a stooped grand-dam with her jewelry bubbling against her skin, then a blackened child screaming for their mama. They reach for him, pleading with wordless cries for someone to save them, for help that does not come.

He tries. Mahal help him, he tries. He yells for them to follow him to safety, and when that does not work, he reaches for them back, again and again, until his hands blister and then burn. The terrible pain is only barely drowned out by his desperate prayers to whatever gods may listen to him in this place, that he might save some of them, at least one of them, please, let him save at least one, let him do something to end this horror - but it is no use. They pass through him as burning smoke and continue on, caught in whatever curse is laid upon this foul place, and Fíli reaches for them until he is staring at his own blackened hands still smoking, and then he begins to weep, for his hearts-rope still pulls him forward to Kíli, and he must keep walking.

"I'm sorry," he says to the shades as he passes, his tears spilling over his cheeks and dampening his beard. "I'm sorry, I cannot help you."

He walks on through the trees. The forest echoes with terrible cries, and he knows that he will never truly forget the sound of them, even until the remaking of the world, just as he will dream of the burning Lakemen and see their faces in every hearth-fire and flickering candle. The mind hurts and heals just as the body does, scabbing and scarring, and even those too may fade over time - but some wounds cut so deeply through the flesh that they score the stone of the soul underneath. He thinks of the great bonfires they light back home once a year to remember the Burned Dwarves of Erebor and Azanulbizar, how as a dwarfling he had watched them from atop cousin Dwalin's big shoulders, and knew to hold on tight so that he would not fall off when the wind blew the sparks towards them and his cousin flinched away.

Dwalin and Thorin were barely his age when they fought through the charnel-house that was Azanulbizar, Fíli remembers, and younger still when Erebor fell. It seems impossible. Fíli has not seen his home ripped apart or his childhood friends burned up like kindling, nor his beloved grandfather's head thrown across the battlefield, and already Fíli feels as brittle as badly-made iron, one hard swing away from shattering.

His heart cries out for relief, for numbness, and how tempting would it be to let himself sink into this desire? His people were built to be strong, but surely not strong enough for this. He wants to close his eyes and tear strips from his clothing to stop up his ears, to run and hide from this enemy that cannot be defeated, only borne, or stay and let it burn away the parts of him that feel anything at all, until he is harder than the stone his people were born from, harder than the diamonds they pull from its bones.

He will not, he tells himself fiercely, and clenches his throbbing hands, already starting to heal. His people are burning and he can do naught but witness and remember, but he must do _something_ , and so he will do this. He will give them the respect they deserve.

After a while, the trees start to thin, and he begins to see glimpses of sunlight through the trees, the promise of snow. He’s almost at the edge when he senses movement out of the corner of his eye and looks up.

There’s a cat seated on a branch of the tree in front of him. Flames lick around it but it seems thoroughly disinterested, washing its white-socked paw. It doesn’t even look up as a screaming shade barrels right underneath it and disappears, but as Fíli approaches it looks down to meet his gaze, golden eyes glinting in the light of the flames.

“Took you long enough,” it says.


End file.
